Re: Polynesian family (was Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China)

E-Ching Ng wrote:

>>How about Malay/Indonesian? They are non-tonal. Or are they regarded as a
>>different language family?
>
>I think they're classed as Austronesian.  The Polynesians were expanding
>across the Pacific at around 700AD, I think, at about the same time as
>the Vikings were on the seas, and they scattered their language family all
>the way from Hawaii to Indonesia.  Don't know why it's called AUSTROnesian,
>come to think of it ... problem set and dinner calling, no time to look it
>up.
AUSTRO for "southern", and NESIAN for "islands". The languages of this
family are spoken predominantly in the "Southern Islands"; from the
northern fringes of the tropics to the sub-antarctic south.

>
>Before I go - I know that Japanese and Malay both have a question-marker
>"ka", though in Malay I think it can go anywhere in the sentence and in
>Japanese it has to be at the end.  I wonder if anyone's looked at Malay
>when trying to trace the origins of Japanese?
Austronesian was indeed looked at for the origins of the Japanese language.
A few advocates of the Austric theory want to include Japanese in the Austric
superfamily (which includes Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, Daic, and Miao-Yao).
But I don't think that theory is well accepted by most Austricists themselves.

-kristian- 8)